1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method of smoothing the surface of printing paper, a smoothing apparatus, and a printer with the smoothing apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
In printing by heat transfer, a protection layer for protecting an ink layer is also transferred along with the ink layer. Ordinarily, the protection layer is transferred by the heat of a thermal head. Further, a technique for transferring the protection layer by the heat of a line heater is also known (described in Granted Japanese Patent No. 3314980).
Incidentally, a technique for re-heating the ink layer after transferred for the purpose of making the ink monomolecular and thereby increasing its resistance to light is also known (described in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 5-69678). For this re-heating, a heating roller is used.
However, if the protection layer is transferred by a thermal head, since the thermal head is formed by arraying a plurality of heat generating portions corresponding to the pixels, the protection layer comes to have portions therein that are located at the heat generating portions and have portions therein that are located between the heat generating portions. For this reason, there are the problems such that the heat applied to the protection layer is not uniform, and thus concavo-convex portions occur in the protection layer and, therefore, the luster was lost.